Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed

for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like

beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'm

thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering

unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got

torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten,

not that some things aren't maybe best forgotten, at a

certain point at least, I've reached that point in my own life

where there's so much I'd rather not remember, that

to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough,

some days, that there's memory at all, though that's not

exactly it, it's more what gets remembered, how we

don't get to choose. For example, if love used to mean

rescue, now it's more gladiatorial, though in the end

more clean: Who said that? Not the one whose face I've

described somewhere as the sun at that moment when,

as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night's

shadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No.

Not that one. And not the one whose specialty was

making a bad habit sound more excusable by calling it

ritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for it

hard enough, you can always find some deeper form

of sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—mere

sorrow lay ... I'd been arguing the difference between

the soul being cast out and the soul departing, so I

still believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.